Never had this problem, but apperently it's common.
Yes I do think you can make money this way.
Tommy

I think the people who would plan ahead enough to pay for this service are the ones who would never need it, and vice versa. Your friends had problems because they didn't handle their business well (a former employee should never have had continuing access, etc.). Given that they were negligent in managing that part, do you really think they'd have signed up and paid for a backup plan?

I've seen it happen before. I could certainly benefit from something like this. In a company I work for, the Ops Manager had a blowout with the owner and changed the passwords etc on his way out. He's sat on the domains ever since.

If there was a way to get them back, I'm sure my boss would be interested!

Good idea if it works.

@micco- this is not a insurance plan that you purchase ahead of time. it's an emergency response you enact once the offense has already occurred

What I'm proposing is essentially an automated way of doing what I did for my friends:
1. snapshot the hostaged site so you have all the content
2. mirror it on an alternate domain (pick up the .net or .biz for the original domain if you want or put it as a subdomain of siteliber8.com)
3. provide a wizard that assists the victim with process of recovering their domain from the registrar

by step #2 you may have already demonstrated that you've removed the leverage that the rogue ex-employee thought they had, so you may not even need to go further- with threat of legal action I would guess 80% of the miscreants would relent at this point.

Who knows how frequently this situation actually occurs, but when it does as a victim you REALLY want to resolve it quickly and therefore should in theory be extremely motivated to pay for service that helped you do so.

sean

am no seasoned IT nor wouldbe..what is this store forme?

I think you're right, and that there is money in this. Websites are often worth large amounts to companies and individuals, both financially and just in terms of the amount of time they'd take to replace. If this is as common a problem as it would appear, I can definitely see a market for your solution.

As with anything like this, I guess getting the service known is the big challenge. However, it sounds (to someone with little to no experience at web programming at least!) as though start-up costs would be minimal - beyond hosting requirements - if you had someone to write the code etc. Go for it!

Good idea. I'm not tech enough to know the details but I accept the facts as given - that this is a problem and that it can be solved manually now, and you are proposing to automate it.

Put it on some kind of website where there is a big button that says: HELP! It would be so satisfying to press that button...

@saigon- i don't understand your question

@PhilipH - you are correct that the biggest challenge would be to spread awareness of the existence of this service to the people afflicted with the problem. it would probably need a better name. the thing is it has the characteristics of buzzworthiness that would make it spread: highly emotional response and if it saves people in a pinch, they will talk about it

@jill - agreed. and given that there's really no cost incurred by SiteLiber8 when people push the button, we can effectively deliver the goods in a limited fashion and charge people to keep the backup copy we created. if you're threatened with the prospect of losing your code and domain, and suddenly you pull the ripcord on our site and have a complete backup copy instantly mirrored on a domain free for 5 days, at the end of that 5 days you bet you're going to enter in your creditcard to keep that backup.

thanks for the feedback. what other flaws am I missing here with this?

sean

I really like this idea. I was in this situation at one point.